valentine's day, continued

Yesterday was William Shakespeare. Today is Dorothy Parker.


A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet --
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

happy valentine's day

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings'.

girl with the pearl necklace

I feel a little out of sorts today--it's been raining and my patience with the rain is just gone. On the other hand, I have gotten to wear my pretty pink pearl necklace from Honolulu for the first time in two weeks, so things are not all bad.

crisis

So, 'Stacia and I have been having a wee bit of a personal crisis. Everyone will be glad to know that it has resolved itself without me pushing her into a river. As a result, it's been a strained week, and my Diet Coke intake is through the roof. My cell phone minutes are pretty impressive, too. How could I have talked for fifteen hours in the past thirty days? Okay, never mind; that's pretty understandable. The hard part to comprehend is that this is only the business hours; my total phone usage is (let me add this up) 2,186 minutes, or 36.5 hours. That's a workweek. That's insane.

However: personal crisis = resolved. Yay cell phone communication!

freezer

The rest of this state is unseasonably warm, but my hotel room was used to store meat in a previous life. (Pork Futures Warehouse, anyone? Points if you know what the heck I'm talking about.) Not being a troll, I don't think better at low temperatures. The heater is doing a terrible job of warming this place up, too.

I went to the local singles branch. There were twenty-two guys and eleven girls, probably the only singles organization in the Church with that sort of ratio. All the guys (awright, most of the guys) were scrawny and had shaved heads. The rest were built like linebackers, and one of them was wearing a West Point class ring. I would have asked if he knew Jonathan, but he looked dangerous. There was one young man in BDUs and another in a very nice suit with precisely the same color scheme. It was testimony meeting, and someone talked about "back in Jerusalem-time," which I thought was a nice regional expression/metaphor.

I had a marvelous piece of chocolate cake yesterday. There's another piece in my fridge now. Not like the fridge isn't a totally unnecessary piece of equipment in this room. Brr.

saturday

More sore throat. Maybe it's blogging I'm allergic to. I've been in perfect health since I stopped, and now that I'm started again, I get sick. Coincidence? I think not.

I suppose I no longer have any excuse not to unpack. If I'm here for another three weeks, it's worth my time and trouble. So today will be unpacking, finding jiu-jitsu places, sending out dry cleaning, etc.

honk if you love north carolina

People here honk all the time. It's always at me, too. I don't know how to take that. I suppose it's a reflection of my driving skills (or skilz), but I'm only marginally worse than usual. I'm just lost a lot. And people are genuinely rude--one guy behind me just kept on honking because he though I was going too slow. (I was driving at the speed limit.) He honked so much, I was worried that my car had caught fire or something. But no.

Yesterday was an exhausting experience. I did four loooong interviews (the longest took 4 hrs or so) and was gone from 7 am to 8 pm. It was no fun, and the hoarseness resulting from talking all day was much increased by a nagging sore throat. How come I have to get sick as soon as I come out here? It's not fair. By my last interview, talking was agony. I nearly cut it off at hour 2.5 or so, but I don't think it's kosher to come back later to finish. I soldiered on, and had a warm, martyrly glow when I was finished.

So today I'm going to type. I wish I weren't--I have plenty of stuff to do, and a lot of it is Mon-Fri only. But it would be disastrous if I ended up with a bad case of anything while on travel, so today is definitely a take-it-slow day.

Which means I may post again later.

'Stacia, I have no camera. You know that.

back again

Sorry for the hiatus. Thanks to Ves for motivation to bring it to an end. I've had an eventful two months, what with Jon's marriage, and Christmas, and January. Oh, wait. Nothing happened in January. So I have no excuse, except a disinclination to bore you all to tears.

It seems less urgent to blog when I'm in the bosom of the family. Of course, the family is shrunk, and so a responsible sister would blog for her distant siblings. Now, though, I'm in North Carolina, close to Fort Bragg, until the end of February. My second-ever business travel! Dad rolls his eyes when I express this sort of feeling, but travel isn't old to me yet, and I am enjoying being back east. I'm doing top secret clearance work here. Not that the work is top secret. The clearances are. I hope that's clear? I like having a rental car and a meal allowance and a corporate credit card. I like the luxurious feeling that I don't have to get up until I actually want to (this may be unique to my kind of business travel, but it certainly is a perk.)

I bought a Palm thingie. (By "thingie," I mean "handheld organizer.") I finally realized that it would materially simplify my life, instead of just being another piece of hardware to haul around. I can't tell you how grown-up I feel.